December 15, 1990
An open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev: Mr. President, you can distribute a large share of the Soviet union’s state-owned property to the most productive people of your country—and do it in a way that will give people the incentive to rapidly improve your economy.
In fact, unless you can do this quickly and fairly, you may well see the disintegration of your union and your hopes for a better economy. Here is how it can be done:
You must create a new currency to reward productive citizens. This new money will be “rights” to buy the state-owned property and industry that you will eventually put up for sale. You should call this new money productivity reward credits or PRC.
PRC cannot be used like ordinary money to buy goods and services. PRC will be credits that your people and only use to buy state-owned property at a later date if your economy improves because of increased productivity on their part. You can distribute PRCs to all Soviet citizens in phases, such that those who increase their productivity the most will receive the most credits.
Thus can you guarantee that the politically powerful, the corrupt, and the greedy will not be the first to acquire the best state-owned property.
You should issue immediately enough PRCs to people to buy at least 30 percent of selected state-owned resources, such as oil and mineral resources, factories, etc. With their PRCs, the people will know they own an interest that cannot be taken away. Then you must issue two kinds of shared in each property that is sold: PRC shares and cash shares. The PRC shares can only be purchased with the citizen-owned PRC credits. The cash shares can be purchased by anyone with money.
In the first phase, you should distribute the initial PRCs to all citizens, with 80 percent going to workers and no more than 20 percent to managers. In the second and third phase distributions, the most productive workers and industries must receive a greater share of PRCs.
Copyright © 1990 Dr. Bill Wattenburg
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